Adrienne Rich’s poem "Origins and History of Consciousness" examines her relationship with poetry, lovers, and the women who came before her. This is a common theme in her work. In this poem, from the author’s perspective of being in her room, we get a unique look at the way her external surroundings influence her and her work.

The poem begins with a description of the room:

Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon
sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wall,
dissected, their bird-wings severed
like trophies. No one lives in this room
without living through some kind of crisis.

She mentions her influences, the women who came before her, paving the way: “photographs of dead heroines.” She wants to connect with people through poetry and through touch.

In part II, she writes about how easy it was to fall in love with a lover:

It was simple to meet you, simple to take your eyes
into mine, saying: these are eyes I have known
from the first . . .

She goes on to talk about how easy it is to connect lives and then how fragile that connection can be against the backdrop of real life, especially between two women at the time:

these two selves who walked half a lifetime untouching-
to wake to something deceptively simple: a glass
sweated with dew, a ring of the telephone, a scream
of someone beaten up far down in the street
causing each of us to listen to her own inward scream . . .

In part III, Rich writes about how trust is something that we move into slowly:

...Trusting, untrusting,
we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselves
downward hand over hand as on a rope that quivered
over the unsearched . . .

The relationship Rich has with her lover cannot be considered “life” because it must be kept secret:

But I can’t call it life until we start to move
beyond this secret circle of fire
where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall . . .